May 15, 2013

I should know better than to bring this up again. But the effective firing of a researcher, Heritage’s Jason Richwine, because of his Harvard dissertation should immediately send up red flags about intellectual freedom. ...

What I do want to insist is that the premise behind almost all the attacks – that there is no empirical evidence of IQ differences between broad racial categories – is not true. It is true (pdf), if you accept the broad racial categories Americans use as shorthand for a bewilderingly complex DNA salad (a big if, of course). There’s no serious debate about that. The serious debate is about what importance to assign to the concept of “IQ” and about the possible reasons for the enduring discrepancies: environment, nurture, culture, or genes – or some variation of them all?

... But the core point about any dissertation is a simple one: does it hold up under scholarly scrutiny? Richard Zeckhauser, the Frank P. Ramsey Professor of Political Economy at Harvard, is on record as saying that “Jason’s empirical work was careful. Moreover, my view is that none of his advisors would have accepted his thesis had he thought that his empirical work was tilted or in error.” One of those advisors was the very serious and very liberal scholar Christopher Jencks.

I haven’t had time to read the thing, and some have cast aspersions on it after a browse. But it is abhorrent to tar someone researching data as a racist and hound him out of a job simply because of his results, honestly discovered and analyzed. ...

But the idea that natural selection and environmental adaptation stopped among human beings the minute we emerged in the planet 200,000 years ago – and that there are no genetic markers for geographical origin or destination – is bizarre. It would be deeply strange if Homo sapiens were the only species on earth that did not adapt to different climates, diseases, landscapes, and experiences over hundreds of millennia. We see such adaptation happening very quickly in the animal kingdom. Our skin color alone – clearly a genetic adaptation to climate – is, well, right in front of one’s nose.

But what the Harvard students are saying is worse than creating a straw man. They are saying that even if it is true that there are resilient differences in IQ in broad racial groupings, such things should not be studied at Harvard because their “end result can only be furthering discrimination.” You can’t have a more explicit attack on intellectual freedom than that. They even seem to want the PhD to be withdrawn. ...

That’s my view in a nutshell. What on earth are these “liberals” so terrified of, if not the truth? ...

But please don’t say truly stupid things like race has no biological element to it or that there is no data on racial differences in IQ (even though those differences are mild compared with overwhelming similarity). Denying empirical reality is not a good thing in any circumstance. In a university context, it is an embrace of illiberalism at its most pernicious and seductive: because its motives are good.

His resignation is emblematic of a corruption that has spread throughout American intellectual discourse.

... I have a personal interest in this story because Jason Richwine was awarded a fellowship from my employer, the American Enterprise Institute, in 2008–09, and I reviewed the draft of his dissertation. A rereading of the dissertation last weekend confirmed my recollection that Richwine had meticulously assembled and analyzed the test-score data, which showed exactly what he said they showed: mean IQ-score differences between Latinos and non-Latino whites, found consistently across many datasets and across time after taking factors such as language proficiency and cultural bias into account. I had disagreements then and now about his policy recommendations, but not about the empirical accuracy of his research or the scholarly integrity of the interpretations with which I disagreed.

In resigning, Dr. Richwine joins distinguished company. The most famous biologist in the world, James D. Watson, was forced to retire from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 2007 because of a factually accurate remark to a British journalist about low IQ scores among African blacks. In 2006, Larry Summers, president of Harvard, had to resign after a series of attacks that began with his empirically well-informed remarks about gender differences. These are just the most visible examples of a corruption that has spread throughout American intellectual discourse: If you take certain positions, you will be cast into outer darkness. Whether your statements are empirically accurate is irrelevant.

In academia, only the tenured can safely write on these topics. Assistant professors know that their chances of getting tenure will be close to zero if they publish politically incorrect findings on climate change, homosexuality, race differences, gender differences, or renewable energy. Their chances will not be much higher if they have published anything with a distinctly conservative perspective of any sort. To borrow George Orwell’s word, they will have proved themselves to be guilty of crimethink.

54 comments:

Anonymous
said...

"But the idea that natural selection and environmental adaptation stopped among human beings the minute we emerged in the planet 200,000 years ago – and that there are no genetic markers for geographical origin or destination – is bizarre."

And there you have it. Liberals believe--like the creationists they belittle--that the natural law of evolution does not apply to human beings. Strange bedfellows indeed.

Most ardent liberals that I know attended Sunday School faithfully as children. In their "rebellion" against an unjust society, they have retained the puritanical moralizing but shed the outward trappings of traditional religious practices.

I really do not respect Andrew Sullivan for his overwrought political conversion. But his readers are the ones the world needs, and it's important that he come out as HBD-positive. Next should be Tyler Cowen. He has spent a decade cultivating the young Journolisters. They can't just call him the r-word. And Prof Gelman needs to come out too.

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"When I chided the author of a successful book for avoiding some obvious issues involving race, he quite rightly replied that if he had included anything about race, everything else in the book would have been ignored."

Is he talking about Steven Pinker? If so, I wonder what Pinker would have to say about all of this.

But let's not go overboard - this IS Andrew Sullivan, after all. He also wrote a bizarre post on Keynes, which began with this quote, without adequately dealing with what the quote meant:

"I think I shall have to give up teaching females after this year. The nervous irritation caused by two hours’ contact with them is intense. I seem to hate every movement of their minds. The minds of the men, even when they are stupid and ugly, never appear to me so repellent."

I googled that and found this Forbes columnist, defending Niall Ferguson. Doesn't ANYBODY remember Niall Ferguson? Or does the left destroy people with such regularity and alacrity that last week's victimization might as well have happened in the 12th century?

As a society we have chosen to make racism -- the notion that one race is superior to another race -- a monstrous evil. Whether racism happens to be empirically true is irrelevant to the discussion. Morality is a social construct. Under a communist system, private property is evil. Under Sharia, a woman showing her do in public is evil. If Richwine was really so naive as to submit a racist dissertation, his academic advisers should have stopped him for his own protection.

They are saying that even if it is true that there are resilient differences in IQ in broad racial groupings, such things should not be studied at Harvard because their “end result can only be furthering discrimination.”

Indeed, I received exactly this reaction recently. I was speaking to a very typical Manhattan liberal, quasi-intellectual, actual Upper West Side dweller. Like someone from Woody Allen central casting.

After her initial aghast shock that I would suggest there are racial differences in IQ, we had a fairly reasoned discussion and it got her to the point of believing ok, maybe there is something to it.

But then she just outright said: "But even if it's true, why would you say such things? People could use it to pay someone less money or to discriminate."

And there you have. Better to hide the truth because somebody might feel bad. The Liberal mind simply doesn't care about the truth one way or the other, they only care about the Narrative they have constructed as an edifice to prop up their empty lives (this woman: 50, no kids, two dogs).

Academia is, and has been for a long time, the most intellectually restrictive environment found anywhere, at least anywhere in the US. And the more utterly self-evident some forbidden truth may be, the more hysterical will be the cries for the heretic's punishment. One can readily understand how burning at the stake was one of the more popular capital punishments in the Dark Ages.

"Whether your statements are empirically accurate is irrelevant" - Charles Murray couldn't be more wrong about that. The defining characteristic of thoughtcrime is that truth is aggravation, not exculpation. Irrefutability is at the heart of the rancour that forbidden speech inspires.

Having now actually read Sully's post (god knows what possessed me), I see you left out the stupidest thing he said while he was following a giant hem with an even bigger haw.

I believe IQ is an artificial construct created to predict how well a random person is likely to do in an advanced post-industrial society. And that’s all it is.

And that's ALL it is??? Oh.

Silly Sully digs the hole deeper still:

I don’t think it carries any moral weight at all, either, and I don’t think it should be used in any way in immigration policy. In fact, any public policy that rests on this kind of data is anathema to me.

Ok, so then "public policy" that relies on data which identifies how well somebody will succeed in that same "public" is forbidden. Is that it? Kind of like saying zero to 60 time information is forbidden in picking which car can go zero to 60 in the shortest time. In other words: blind me, please!

By the standards of the media, his post was almost incredibly daring. But he's still a self-deluded chump.

I hope no one gets the impression from these excerpts that Sullivan is in any way on our side. Go and read his entire piece. He repeats the stupid and baseless slander that Richwine wrote for "white supremacist" publications, denies that IQ (which he asserts is mostly meaningless) should play any part in our immigration policy (Sullivan supports more immigration), and seems to think that the main danger in persecuting heretics like Richwine is that racists might somehow take encouragement from it. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

"...if you accept the broad racial categories Americans use as shorthand for a bewilderingly complex DNA salad."

Another Leftist rationalization denying the existence of race/ethnicity. It's just another lying attempt to convince us that we are all alike really. It's just like those TV commercials where AmerIndian parents have White children.

It's just another lie to get us to accept the influx of third-world savages into the U.S. because "How can we possibly tell who are the ones to be deported?"

Haha. It's easy. If they are nonWhite, third-world savages then we should take a good hard look at them. But according to Leftist imbeciles there is no such thing as White unless we need a villain.

Race realism is like the advance of a continental ice sheet - very slow but inexorable. Or maybe I should say that the liberal anti-racism people are in slow inexorable retreat - like the Nazis after Kursk.

Little that is really new has been discovered about race since about 1970. We knew then that blacks have smaller brains. We knew then that blacks had higher crime rates, higher unemployment and lower school achievement.

What is different today is that millions of white people now know at least some of this. It is now common knowledge that blacks have an average IQ of 85. In 1965 I didn't know that.

Millions now know about brain volume differences too. Steven Jay Gould inadvertently contributed to public understanding by his unashamed lying.

I remember an article in a sports magazine that attributed Oscar Robertson's basketball proficiency to his greater dedication. They said that blacks practiced longer and harder than white people. Today sportswriters don't have to make up goofy theories to account for the presence of blacks on the ball court. Millions of men tacitly assume that blacks have genetic advantages.

The "everyone is the same under the skin" people are in a long retreat. They have not been able to mount a counter attack. Despite all the obfuscation there have been no new studies or insights or observations that lend support to the liberal anti-racists.

I watched a documentary about Goebbels last night. He never lost the faith either. When the Soviets had pushed the Nazis back to Berlin and Hitler was in the bunker he was still preaching the same message. Academic liberal anti-racists are in the bunker and the ruins of their ideology are everywhere outside.

Richwine is just late causality in a war lost long ago. His case does not presage some new attack on academics who dare to speak up. Those attacks have been commonplace for decades. He is not a pioneer. He is more like a soldier who ventured out from cover because he thought the fighting was over.

The struggle between race realism and liberal anti-racism is nearly over. There will be a few more casualties like the poor Mr. Richwine, but the next struggle has already begun. America needs to develop policies to deal with racial differences.

America understands what happened to Detroit. Now we need to craft a series of policies to assure that that doesn't happen again.

If blacks are different - and they are - what does that mean in how we craft our laws? Does it make sense to have gun control for blacks. We have some of that already in that we lock up felons where they can't have guns (except perhaps in Baltimore). In WWII we incarcerated Japanese in a form of preventative detention. Should we not have gotten Trayvon Martin off the streets too and into preventative detention?

When they do these background checks prior to a gun purchase what factors are considered relevant? Surely just being black is more predictive of future gun misuse than any other factor.

Our whole jurisprudence assumes equality before the law. But that was an eighteenth century notion. Don't we know better now? One easily identified group are now known to be five to ten times as criminally violent as others. We know this. Why don't we act on our knowledge?

add Andrew Sullivan to Will Saletan of Slate, and I begin to have some small glimmer of hope in the future of the world.

However, the ease with which some of the most accomplished and intelligent humans alive(Summers and Watson) are branded as incurable racists and cast aside is truly bothersome. Stephanie Grace is clearly smarter than 99.99% of humanity, but was so easily tarred and feathered.

Looks like Steve just earned himself another donation from me for fighting the good fight.

The inquisitors of Jason Richwine are drunk on power, while he's sober as a priest on Sunday. Also, Steve, "In vino veritas" ("Eppur si muove", too) could serve as a half-clever slogan for Richwine and fellow acknowledgers of reality, but maybe you could come up with a more clever usage. And... hmm... Jason Richwine & The Acknowledgers of Reality -- does Jason play any instruments?

That band name has a nice ring to it, and his academic gig hasn't exactly worked out for him. Ideas, people! More seriously, the reality-based community should have some means of supporting people like him. Microryza has some potential for cases like these. Maybe. Anything else come to mind?

"I am not defending the Heritage report on immigration because I think it’s a loaded piece of agitprop. And I am emphatically not defending everything that Richwine has said and done (not least his disturbing willingness to be published in white supremacist magazines)."

"[W]hite supremacist magazines" which Mr. Sullivan did not deign to name. Moreover, since Richwine has become radioactive, to which magazines does Mr. Sullivan expect Richwine to be allowed to grant interviews?

For my part, I’ve come to doubt the existence of something called “g” or general intelligence, as the research has gathered over the years. I believe IQ is an artificial construct created to predict how well a random person is likely to do in an advanced post-industrial society. And that’s all it is. It certainly shouldn’t be conflated with some Platonic idea of “intelligence.” I don’t think it carries any moral weight at all, either, and I don’t think it should be used in any way in immigration policy. In fact, any public policy that rests on this kind of data is anathema to me. It’s far too close to eugenics, and to the morally repugnant idea that smarter people are somehow better in any meaningful sense.

So, he does defend Richwine, but denies that IQ is a meaningful measurement, and even if it were, it shouldn't be used for immigration purposes.

Academic freedom! What a crock. It was developed only - only - to let communist professors keep their jobs. Where it does not serve that function, it does not exist. Get used to it, Sullivan, you naive ...

Sullivan writes, "I believe IQ is an artificial construct created to predict how well a random person is likely to do in an advanced post-industrial society.... I don’t think it should be used in any way in immigration policy."

So even though, by his own admission, average IQ predicts how a group will function in our own society, it should not be used in any way to consider who should be allowed to immigrate; nor, presumably, should IQ be a factor in any decision as to how many immigrants we should allow, because determining whether it would create an insupportably large underclass would be unseemly.

One of the things I detest about how society deals with this issue is that one can get away with otherwise truly bizarre assertions like this without in any way having to defend them. One need mere bow to the reigning taboo, and the need for further argument ends.

Dr. Murray wrote:-"Others have deliberately refrained from discussing race or gender differences in works that ordinarily would have called for treating those topics. When I chided the author of a successful book for avoiding some obvious issues involving race, he quite rightly replied that if he had included anything about race, everything else in the book would have been ignored."-Quite possibly he meant himself, writing his recent bookComing Apart. The State of White America, 1960-20010",http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-State-America-1960-2010/dp/030745343X/ref=sr_1_1? -I do not want any quarrel, but Dr. Murray could mention Professor Robert Weissberg, purged from "National Review" almost synchronously with you know whom.This is censorship either applied by NR, or by Dr. Murray himself.

I was beginning to wonder if any right-liberals were interested in defending Truth as a value anymore. So well done those two, I guess. But the behaviour of many right-liberals in enforcing the Left's orthodoxy on their own kind is disgusting.

***But then she just outright said: "But even if it's true, why would you say such things? People could use it to pay someone less money or to discriminate." ***

Duh to the 1000th power here.

The reason to say such things is that the falsities they refute are used against me all the time--they are absolutely necessary to reach the conclusion that all the problems Blacks and Hispanics have are the fault of white people and white people should pay to fix them. If you stop using that false consequence of your false assumptions against me, I'll have no desire to talk about race.

Appalling as this may be to state, Andrew Sullivan has actually done Richwine a bigger favour (despite the somewhat weasel maneuverings) than Charles Murray.

Sure, Murray's is an intellectually (and morally) better defense and he's got more brains in his big toe than Sullivan has between his ears, BUT,in the media and academia, Murray is a Nazi/KKK/Fascist/Racist/Genocidal pig, while Sullivan is a liberal and even better yet, gay(!)

If Richwine's got any hope of moving on from this, it'll be more owed to Sullivan than Murray.

"As a society we have chosen to make racism -- the notion that one race is superior to another race -- a monstrous evil."

Not always--seems today racism is allowed exist as a one-way street. Take sports.

While Jimmy the Greek decades ago was fired for saying what, in essence, is the truth, that blacks have physical characteristics that make them better suited to excel at some sports requiring short bursts of speed, today sports commentators talk about it all the time, as if we all agree on it...and we do.

However, mentioning other traits is a no-no. Even when sports commentators cover the violence often associated with black athletes, that violence is explained all the time as a function of a "bad upbringing."Nurture, never nature.

... and I don’t think it (IQ)should be used in any way in immigration policy.

This could be arranged, Andrew, if only your side would allow it. So further Mexican immigration would be restricted on the grounds that it makes the country too crowded. It would be restricted on the grounds that we don't like hearing Spanish everywhere. And on the grounds that Mexicans tend to mimic blacks in expecting to have civilized norms waived for them. See? No need to mention IQ at all.

Charles Murray posted a link on Twitter to the following petition by Harvard's Kennedy School to "Reject all scholarship based on doctrines of racial superiority or hierarchy", despite the fact that they "unequivocally support academic freedom and a university dedicated to the open exchange of ideas".

Lot's of feedback from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and the Harvard Divinity School (church and state - reunited, and it feels so good). I wasn't able to spot any responses from any psychologists or sociologists.

"So, he does defend Richwine, but denies that IQ is a meaningful measurement"

That's fine. The biggest joke in this whole affair is the media are attacking the *data* not knowing that the data is accepted. The same data will be used in many liberal books and papers followed by a long argument over the flaws in IQ testing.

Lot's of feedback from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and the Harvard Divinity School (church and state - reunited, and it feels so good). I wasn't able to spot any responses from any psychologists or sociologists.'

Do the leftists have any alternative explanations for why Hispanics don't do very well here, or why Hispanic countries don't work very well? Even the whiter countries like Argentina have not performed well by Norte Americano standards. For a time Argentine per capita income was about the highest in the world. Brazil has a lot of potential...and always will.

Legacy of colonialism doesn't cut it: they were colonies in the same sense the US and Canada were. Largely settler states. Sure, the American Monroe doctrine made Latin America the playground of the US. That's not an explanation though. Why didn't it go the other way, with tinpot Maple and Tobacco Republics in el Norte exploited by Latinoa companies backed by Hispanic military might? They have the occasional war, but their wars are retarded, and mostly internal Their military expenditures go to internal control.

Latin America plus Brazil is about half of the New World. Most of Alaska and Canada are wastelands, so they're more than half of the livable land.

Does Latin America suffer under an uncaring, callous elite who don't invest in the education and health of their people? Why do they have elites like that? Maybe because Spaniards aren't very good at running things? Maybe because the rich have noticed that the peons aren't very capable?

Even leftist answers boil down to Latin America is middling because the Spanish and Portuguese colonized it. It would be a better place if it had better colonists. If the left and neocons wanted the best for Latin Americans, they'd encourage them to stay home and Anglos to immigrate. In the medium-run, Hispanic living standards won't improve.

I wonder how South America would have turned out had the Spanish and Portuguese not been tan with black hair and eyes. If they looked less like the natives, would Americans realize that they were a vile oppressor caste? The Afrikaners are vilified, but they probably treated their black population better than many Spanish treat the Indios on their plantations.

Is there any data on the height difference between the squatter and anchor baby generations of Hispanics? If the second generation or third generations are a lot taller than their parents and grandparents, that does give some reason to hope that they're smarter too. I don't live in an area with very many, but from the photos all I can tell is that they get pretty chubby.

Maybe 10% of illegals are in LA right now, but that'll change when they're not-an-amnesty-amnestied. When their kids learn English (Thanks Ron Unz!) they won't have to live in lumps of espanol-speakers, they could spread pretty fast. It'd be nice to bet the country on something a bit more solid than silly things like they'll do well because racism is bad.

But then she just outright said: "But even if it's true, why would you say such things? People could use it to pay someone less money or to discriminate."

The obvious rejoinder is that the current false consciousness is ALREADY used to discriminate against and take money from people.

Discrimination against Whites in employment and college admissions is justified by the claim that Black dysfunction is due to Whites, not genes. Confiscation of trillions of dollars of White wealth is justified in the same way. Think about the lunatic Judge Clark in Kansas City.

Race realism is like the advance of a continental ice sheet - very slow but inexorable.

I don't agree with you, but if I did I would say that you have it backwards. It would be like the retreat of an ice sheet. A hundred fifty years ago we knew all the things that we know now, but Franz Boas instituted an ice ago circa 1910. Its glaciers concealed the truth.

Little that is really new has been discovered about race since about 1970. We knew then that blacks have smaller brains. We knew then that blacks had higher crime rates, higher unemployment and lower school achievement.

What is different today is that millions of white people now know at least some of this. It is now common knowledge that blacks have an average IQ of 85. In 1965 I didn't know that.

In 1970, every White in the South at an elevation of less than 500 feet knew this. That is no longer true; probably fewer than half now believe their own experience. So, who would be more numerous? People like you? Or people like them? Can the internet really outdo the centralized mass media?

It may be useful to contemplate what might be possible if conditons worsen. I would hope that observant and able Americans could pass along data and prepared texts to counterparts in regions of the developed world according more freedom than we have: Eastern Europe, Russia, China, forexample. This might amount to publishing under paraphrase and assumed names?

Albertosaurus: "Little that is really new has been discovered about race since about 1970. ... What is different today is that millions of white people now know at least some of this."

I disagree. First, every White person understood those things, at some level, in 1970. Maybe even 1870. Do I hear 1770? Second, since 1970 science has begun to zero in on the precise mechanisms involved, for example the violence gene (MAOA-2R, which has frequency ratio >10:1 Blacks:Whites).

"Coffee comes from Ethiopia, but Ethiopians obviously have some Caucasoid admixture. From Australian aborigines the world got nothing at all. "

I don't know about the Portugese, but the vast majority of Spaniards are not "tan" unless they've been trying to get one. Nor do most have black hair--medium brown is the most common shade, with dark brown the next most common. Shades of tan hair, and blond, are seem often on kids. It's not for nothing that when the first native Americans saw the Spanish, they mistook them for a group of blond white people (I blush to write it, but the word was "gods") who had lived among them long before. The Spanish didn't like this at all because they thoght the "blond gods" were probably those pesky English or Dutch who'd got there first. Anyway, IMO, the physical appearance of the Spanish did not make the difference. What made the difference was the centuries long closness to middle eastern, Arab cultures, whom they had just thrown out once and for all in the 1490s. This, plus the Roman Catholicism, did make their interaction different. Too long a story to go into here.

"Albertosaurus: "Little that is really new has been discovered about race since about 1970. ... What is different today is that millions of white people now know at least some of this."

I disagree. First, every White person understood those things, at some level, in 1970. Maybe even 1870. Do I hear 1770? Second, since 1970 science has begun to zero in on the precise mechanisms involved, for example the violence gene (MAOA-2R, which has frequency ratio >10:1 Blacks:Whites)."

I think what Albertaurus meant was that polite whites pretended not to notice, and sincerely thought that such deficiencies could be eliminated as blacks became more "educated." Education depends a great deal on the raw material.

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